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For many people, Instagram sale is not a pretty picture

Two days after news broke that Facebook will buy Instagram for $1 billion, we’re starting to get an idea of how it’s being interpreted by the public.

In short: not well.

Social analytics provider Crimson Hexagon revealed that only 12 percent of more than 201,000 mentions of the sale were rated positive, while 35 percent were undeniably negative.

One in 10 tweets about the subject indicated that people were planning to delete their Instagram account.

Among those who are upset about the sale is Harry Bernstein, co-owner of digital agency The 88. He immediately launched saveinstagram.com as “a call to action for Twitter users to tweet their Instagram photos by using the hashtag #instagram … as a collaborative protest.”

Bernstein is upset that Instagram “sold users” rather than its photo enhancing technology. He sees the sale as potentially setting a bad precedent for other community-gathering startups.

“I think it will set the precedent that people can just build the trust of a community and just sell them,” Bernstein says. “That is the point of what I'm trying to do. Show startups that this isn't acceptable and people do care.”

How active is the Instagram community to which Bernstein refers? This interactive graphic from Online MBA Programs (via HuffPost), which you can activate by clicking on the image, breaks it down by the numbers: